Faculty Development

Few medical faculty, at either the undergraduate or the graduate level, are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about end-of-life care and therefore are not likely to be effective teachers. To compound this, there is little end-of-life care included in the grand rounds, teaching conferences, or journal clubs of traditional continuing medical education (CME) programs.

The end-of-life skills of interns and residents, who often act as role models for medical students in hospitals, may be lacking and should also be enhanced through special programs for house staff (Weissman et al., 1999).